


99 Problems

by A_Diamond



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Artist Steve Rogers, Bucky Barnes as Captain America, Developing Relationship, M/M, Modern Steve Rogers, Non-Serum Steve Rogers/Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes | Shrinkyclinks, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-16
Updated: 2019-01-27
Packaged: 2019-08-24 08:54:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16636817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Diamond/pseuds/A_Diamond
Summary: “I,” Steve said, then stopped. “You—” didn’t work out any better. “What?”The man who’d been sitting in Steve’s studio apartment-cum-art studio when he came home leaned the slightest bit forward and repeated, “I’m commissioning you for a run of comic books. Your website indicates you do that,” he added when Steve just kept staring at him.Steve Rogers has 99 problems. James Buchanan Barnes is at least 82 of them.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [starmaki (themirrordarkly)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/themirrordarkly/gifts).



> Starmaki, thank you so much for bidding on me for FTH and helping shape this story—and being patient as it runs away from the intended 5k plan!

“I,” Steve said, then stopped. “You—” didn’t work out any better. “What?”

The man who’d been sitting in Steve’s studio apartment-cum-art studio when he came home leaned the slightest bit forward and repeated, “I’m commissioning you for a run of comic books. Your website indicates you do that,” he added when Steve just kept staring at him.

“Yeah, not for people who break into my apartment.”

The man studied Steve and Steve studied him right back. His leather jacket matched his leather eye patch; Steve’s eye for aesthetic was very sure that was the right order of it.

“Does it happen often enough that you had to make that a rule?”

He asked it with the kind of bland curiosity people usually used when making small talk about someone else’s job that they found incredibly boring. Every single thing about the conversation, Steve realized, was absurd.

“No,” he said, “it’s just common fucking sense.”

“Is it? I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure common fucking sense is running out of here and screaming for someone to call the police. But you haven’t, and that’s why I chose you. Because this assignment—well, it would also send anyone with common sense running away screaming.”

“I still haven’t ruled it out,” Steve lied. He was at least invested enough to want to know what it was all about before trying to throw the man out of his apartment; there definitely wasn’t going to be any screaming involved on his part, though. People expected it of him, sometimes, because of how he looked: small and frail. But this man seemed to take it as understood that Steve was more than that, and he appreciated that so much that it was probably detrimental to his long-term health.

Because it made him ignore what really was the sensible action and instead ask, “So, you gonna tell me what this mysterious assignment of yours is any time tonight?”

He got a one-eyed eyeroll for that, which he thought was pretty fucking ballsy coming from a guy who’d broken into his apartment to talk cryptically about assignments that would send people screaming like a Bond villain. Steve crossed his arms and glared back; he was not going to be cast as a Bond girl. Still raising his eyebrow like a dick, the man leaned back and spoke.

“My name is Nick Fury. I’m the director of a little government agency called SHIELD. We have… a bit of a PR problem and you’re going to help us fix it.”

Steve said, “Huh.” He knew all about their ‘PR problem’ and so did anyone who’d caught national or international news in the last week. He let the silence sit for a minute, but Fury didn’t so much as blink and Steve wasn’t actually that patient. “How do you think a comic’s gonna make people forget about the school bus?”

“We think people might judge differently if they had the full picture of what was happening that day. The choices that had to be made.”

The ill-advised interest Steve had been cultivating dropped away, leaving behind an unhappy lurch in his stomach. “I happen to be one of the people judging the choices made, you know. I’m not going to illustrate your cover-ups.”

Fury barked a laugh and waved his hand, dismissing the thought. “If I wanted someone to draw a picture of my ass and tell me it was pretty, I would’ve stuck with our in-house artists. Propaganda’s easy, Rogers, and not what I’m here for.”

“Really? Because whatever you want to call it, it sounds like pushing your agenda.”

“It’s a PR move, sure,” Fury admitted with the same easy carelessness. “But the general public is more skeptical than ever—as demonstrated,” he added, flashing a quick hint of a lopsided smile at Steve. “Bullshitting them isn’t gonna work. We’re going to give you access to the Avengers and their stories, we’re going to stop you from including anything that would blow the shit out of our security, and beyond that we’re going to give you free rein as a creator. You decide what you think the rest of America, the rest of the world should know. As positive or negative as you decide.”

Steve wasn’t sure he believed that, either, but Fury didn’t follow it up with any more promises or enticements. He just sat there, waiting for Steve’s response, and that more than the actual argument was almost enough to sway him. He had one more question, though: “Did the Soldier know that the bus was empty?”

“No.” That was it. No excusing, no equivocating, no flinching.

It was a bad idea for so many reasons. The Avengers were, as his mom would’ve said, a hot fucking mess at the moment and Steve was mess enough himself that he didn’t need any help in that department. He had plenty of his own fights to deal with without taking on more on behalf of Tony Stark, Bruce Banner, this Nick Fury guy, and whoever else was behind the band of so-called superheroes. He needed the money, but not badly enough to compromise his ideals.

No, that was a lie. He needed the money very badly, had been making the choice between rent and food at the end of the month for over a year, but he was surviving. If it came down to it, he could keep surviving; he refused to let that be the deciding factor or an influence at all. He’d been stubborn since birth, as Sarah Rogers had insisted on reminding him every birthday until the end: twelve hours in labor, trying to turn the wrong way the whole time, refusing to cry for the first few minutes and giving her half a heart attack.

Ultimately, it was that stubbornness that did it. He didn’t think that anything the Avengers or SHIELD did could change public opinion about the kind of man who would use a potentially occupied school bus as a weapon, and he knew they wouldn’t be able to change his mind. If they needed someone to prove that to them, he’d be happy to help.

“Okay,” he said. “So how do we do this?”

The answer, at least initially, was very slowly and with a lot of paperwork. Steve got non-disclosure agreements and employment contracts and more. He did his best to make sure he knew what he was agreeing to, but he wasn’t a lawyer, couldn’t afford to hire one, and wouldn’t have trusted any that Fury paid for. So he pushed on and figured he’d fight them in court if it came to that; even if they sued the shit out of him and won, it wasn’t like he had anything to lose.

He was also sure Fury had to have done at least some checking into him, but half the pile of papers he received were for a full background investigation with questions on all the places he’d lived, all his jobs, anything that would make him a target for blackmail. It irked him, having to provide so much of his personal life; he valued his privacy and didn’t think it was any of the government’s business what he might’ve done with whom in his college years.

But again, stubbornness won out. He’d made up his mind to take the job, to face down the Avengers and call them out on putting innocent lives in danger, and he wasn’t going to back down from it for anything.

Which was how, a few months later, he found himself standing in the lobby of Stark Tower while a receptionist who looked bored but could probably kill him with spare office supplies made a call. “Miss Potts, Mister Rogers is here to see Director Fury.”

Keeping a straight face while calling him ‘Mister Rogers’ was something not everyone could do; no one who knew him was able to, for sure. The woman at the desk—she didn’t have a name tag; Steve was torn between appreciating a company that didn’t force its employees to pimp out their personal identities as customer service and uneasily wondering if she had a personal identity or was really some new Stark tech—didn’t bat a perfectly groomed eyelash. That sort of professionalism was probably what they paid her for, and also a large part of why Steve had only lasted a week at his one front desk gig and never applied for another.

“Please have a seat, they’ll be with you shortly.”

Steve walked over to the chairs she indicated, but even though they looked unusually comfortable, he was too energized to sit. The anticipation had been unbearable for months as he planned out the possibilities, strategized what he would say, considered best- and worst-case scenarios. He’d barely slept the night before for the adrenaline; ready for a fight and indecently excited about it. The world had mostly forgotten the last Avengers’ disaster, moved on to new scandals and political debates, but Steve hadn’t. That incident had gotten him a job, after all, and been his focus for months.

He didn’t have long to wait, which was good since the receptionist was starting to frown at his restless not-sitting. A door at the other end of the lobby opened to reveal an elevator with Nick Fury, Pepper Potts, who Steve recognized but had never met, and Maria Hill, who Steve knew from his clearance process. Pepper was in the lead, and she offered Steve a smile and a hand when she was near enough.

“Steve, so nice to finally meet you.”

“Likewise, ma’am.”

“Please, call me Pepper. The team’s excited to meet you as well, but…” Her smile turned mischievous and bright as she lowered her voice, not quite a whisper but still a suggestion of intimacy to it. “We could make them wait a little longer if you want to have a look at your suite first.”

Having to live at the tower was almost a deal-breaker for Steve. He and Fury had spent a solid two hours yelling at each other over it, especially when he’d been told that he wasn’t going to be allowed to leave for the first month at least. For “security reasons”—which Steve took to mean that Fury still didn’t trust him not to turn around and sell out the Avengers’ secrets the first chance he got. That pissed him off almost as much as the previously unmentioned period of imprisonment as a term of employment and he was close to walking away from the whole project.

Then Fury had said, “Fine, we’ve got alternates to approach. I knew you wouldn’t be able to handle it,” and Steve had—honestly, he’d let himself be manipulated. He could admit that. It was one of the many, recurring drawbacks of his hot temper, and the one that had aggrieved his mother and past boyfriends the most: The best way to get Steve to do something was to tell him he couldn’t. A lifetime of being belittled and underestimated for his size and health had left a pretty serious chip on his shoulder; even knowing it was there didn’t stop his knee-jerk reaction.

So in the end he’d agreed to it, but he wasn’t particularly excited about going to see his new jail cell, even though it was bound to be several degrees of magnitude nicer than his actual apartment. Still, he appreciated the offer and especially the way in which it had been phrased. He liked Pepper immediately, even if he didn’t trust her much further than Fury or Hill. She was at least recognizably human in a way the other two, particularly Fury, seemed to want to avoid.

“Thanks,” he told her, and because he wasn’t completely without manners, “I’m sure it’s great, I really appreciate you all going out of your way to make me feel comfortable here, but I think I’d rather get started.”

In the moment that her smile faltered, he tried to figure out what unintentional insult had been in his words; he really tried to keep his insults intentional. But then she laughed brightly and said, “Wow. You’re much better at that than Tony.”

He felt like he was missing something, but Pepper just smiled again and waved him off when he tried to ask. “I’ll let you get to it, then. If you ever need anything, JARVIS—that’s the building’s AI, he can reach me for you.”

As she left, walking past Steve toward the front doors, Fury turned around and headed back to the elevator without a word. He looked at Hill, who rolled her eyes but nodded in that direction, so they both followed. The doors slid closed, mirror-bright reflections of the three of them, before Fury spoke. When he took the audible breath preceding it, Steve considered asking if he really had to be such a dramatic asshole all the time, but decided against it.

“At the request of the team,” Fury started. He didn’t sound happy about it, which was all good as far as Steve was concerned. “You’ll be introducing yourself to all of them at once without me or Commander Hill. Any interviews you do later will also be only in the presence of Avengers unless everyone in the room agrees on who else should be there. Including you.”

Obviously, Steve had been caught up in the middle of some kind of drama. Power struggle between the Avengers and SHIELD, personal pissing match between Tony Stark and Nick Fury, he didn’t know what. If it kept Fury away from him and lowered the chances of government censorship when he was face-to-face with the Avengers, he hoped it would last the entire six-month lifespan of the project.

With a melodic chime, the elevator glided to a halt and the doors opened to a short hallway and another door at the end of it, labelled ‘Conference 6.’ Steve squared his shoulders and set his jaw. He was about to walk into a room filled with the most powerful people in the world. He was probably going to yell at them.

Fury stopped him with a quiet but firm, “Rogers” just after he’d crossed the elevator’s threshold.

“I just want to be sure you understand,” he told Steve gravely, “that this is your last chance to back out. If you walk away now, rest assured that you’ll be under surveillance for the rest of your life, but we will let you walk away. Past this point, you’re either working with us or you’re in a detention facility that doesn’t even exist on paper, with no contact with the outside world, until the information you have is no longer a threat to us.”

Steve stared at him. “You can’t do that.” When Fury just looked back at him placidly, unconcerned with Steve’s opinions of what he could and could not do, it only made him angrier. “You can’t do that! There are laws, we have a constitution to protect the rights of this country’s citizens from government abuses like indefinite and secret imprisonment.”

Fury flashed him a shark’s grin. “We sure do, but I’ll do it anyway.” The shiny steel door closed on his easy and, Steve was sure, not the least bit idle threat—dramatic asshole.

Standing there being angry wouldn’t do any good, nor would kicking at the door, which almost certainly didn’t even have Fury behind it anymore, so Steve had to direct his rage in a more productive direction; he started down the hall, glaring at the conference room door like it was responsible for his bad mood. It almost was, since that room held the Avengers and the Avengers were the reason Fury was in contact with Steve at all. And that wasn’t even the only bone he had to pick with them.

The walk was brief, but long enough for him to build up a good, warming anger at the world in general and the Avengers in particular by the time he reached the door, and that gave him the impetus to yank it open with more force than he usually would’ve. Only the force he attempted didn’t really play out, because the door was solid hardwood, much heavier than he expected, and so just getting it open took all his massed strength and still left him wobbling unsteadily when he finally accomplished it. And of course there was a table full of superheroes staring at him on the other side, no doubt judging him for his inability to open their superhero door—Tony Stark, front and center, had the look of a man barely holding back his laughter.

Heat rushed to Steve’s cheeks, embarrassment and spite about to lash out in a tirade on ableism and how exceptionally shitty it was to expect everyone to match your capabilities when you had super-human abilities. Before he could start on it, one of those very same superhumans sprang up from his chair at the closer end of the table and hurried over to hold the door for Steve and that managed something few people had accomplished before.

Steve was so livid he couldn’t even find the words to express his rage.

He just stood there, glaring at the Winter fucking Soldier, who stood there and seemed to be staring back with a frown line growing across the only visible part of his face above the goggles and mask. The seconds dragged on as Steve didn’t move, didn’t take his hand from the door handle even though the Soldier was holding all of its weight from the other side as though he expected Steve to just duck under his arm or something. Not that Steve would have to duck very far, and if that was the point the Soldier was trying to make then Steve was going to find out if he had a cup on under all that dark, strappy armor.

“Uh,” Stark said. Steve only knew it was him from the recognizable voice, since he wasn’t willing to break away from scowling at the Soldier. “Is this starting to feel weirdly sexually charged to anyone else?”

The Soldier jerked back to look at Stark and Steve pulled the door open a little further to push through the opening left behind. He didn’t have to duck at all, but his shoulder accidentally brushed the Soldier’s chest as he passed; the bulletproof vest felt bruisingly solid for a man with the reputation of a ghost. Steve ignored the shiver that rippled its way down his spine at the contact—just a normal reaction to having an assassin at his back, he reasoned.

And another at his front, he soon realized, because the woman sitting closest to the seat the Soldier had vacated had to be Black Widow. She didn’t appear in the videos of the Avengers’ fights nearly as often as the others, he probably wouldn’t have been able to pick her out of a lineup, but she couldn’t have been anyone else in that company. She’d defected with the Soldier, or so the story went; he didn’t know much more than that. The two of them were enigmatic even for anonymous members of an extra-governmental combat team.

On her other side was Hawkeye. Like the rest, he was in uniform—though could it be called that when none of them were the same? Costume, maybe. The Soldier was the only one of the six with his face covered, but Hawkeye and Widow were just as anonymous. On Stark’s other side was Banner, fortunately not in his green rage monster form, and Thor. Steve, like many of his fellow New Yorkers, was still kind of iffy on the whole alien thing, so he wasn’t actually sure if there was a secret identity going on there or if Thor was just Thor all the time.

“Hey, so, Steve—can I call you Steve? Steve, come on and have a seat,” Stark said without taking a breath, much less a pause for Steve to answer. “Lurker McStabby, less lurking. We’ve talked about this, this is not how normal people flirt. If you want the cute twink’s number I can just give it to you since we’re getting him his very own StarkPhone.”

“Oh my god,” Banner moaned, dropping his face in his hands.

“Wait, is that how normal people flirt?” Hawkeye looked from Stark to Widow with what seemed to be sincere concern.

Before he could finish whatever thought was coming, she rolled her eyes and said, “Tony, be a dick on your own time. Soldat,” and then something in Russian that got the Soldier to let the door slam shut behind Steve and stalk back to his chair.

She turned her attention to Steve, who wasn’t the least bit mollified by her diplomatic half-smile. Marching over to the table himself, he carefully set down his sketchbook and pencils—couldn’t afford to break those no matter how pissed he was. He pulled out the chair placed there for him, the only one on his side of the table so he had to face down all of the assembled Avengers when he sat. Then he folded his hands in front of him and locked eyes with Iron Man.

“Just because you surround yourself with people who are paid to put up with your shit doesn’t mean I’m going to, Mr. Stark.” His voice was as steady as his nerves, the adrenaline of a fight that always made him settle into himself rather than shaking him up. “I don’t like bullies, but I’ve been dealing with them my entire life because I’ve always been that scrawny, sickly fag. You’re not going to scare me, you’re not going to hurt my feelings, and I’m not going to let your homophobic crap slide just because you have the money to pretend you’re Batman.”

Eyes wide, Stark leaned back and raised his hands in a slightly half-assed version of surrender, or at least appeasement. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Who’s homophobic? Is this because I called you a cute twink? That was—there’s nothing wrong with being a twink! I was a twink back in my youth, you know, just the right mix of cute and hot. Man, those were the days. Never paid for a single drink, let me tell you. Of course, I’m not really into the whole dick thing, but—”

Banner groaned again. “Tony, I’m begging you, shut up.”

“Okay,” Stark assented. He had the gall to act wounded about it. “Okay, fine. I’m just trying to relate here, but fine.”

When he dropped his hands to focus on Steve, all the drama also dropped away with a disconcerting quickness that still came across as genuine. “I didn’t mean it like that, but I’m sorry for saying it at all. And I won’t help Frosty the Snowmurderer stalk you unless you want me to.”

Steve set his jaw and nodded. “If we can get back to what I’m actually here for?”

“Yes!” Thor clapped his hand on the table; Steve was amazed it didn’t shatter. “Introductions before courtship! I am Thor Odinson.”

“Steve Rogers. Are you—”

“Questions at the end,” Stark interrupted. “Trust me, it’ll take way too long to get to the end otherwise and the end is the best part.”

‘The end’ could’ve meant the end of the meeting, Stark letting them all know how impatient he was to be done; maybe the Avengers didn’t like Fury’s plan, maybe Stark just didn’t like Steve, maybe his infamous manic restlessness was kicking in. But he also might have been referring to the other end of the table, to the Soldier. Needling him again—in just the few minutes Steve had been there, he already got the feeling that their relationship was strained at best. The only reason they weren’t at the farthest corners of the table, he suspected, was that Stark wanted to be front and center.

“I’m Tony Stark, you know that because I’m me. Dr. Bruce Banner, Hulk, you know that because Ross is a dick. That’s the boring part over, now on to the mysteries.” With an air of magnanimity and untempered glee, he waved to his left, to Hawkeye, Widow, and the Soldier. So it was about one of them.

Hawkeye wasn’t paying attention, fiddling with something small and glittery until Widow nudged him. When he looked up in surprise, his attention went first to Stark. “Wait, Tony’s done talking? I was not expecting Tony to be done talking. What are we doing?”

“Introductions, Clint,” Banner said, and Hawkeye said, without turning, “Hi, I’m Clint.”

It occurred to Steve, probably much later than it should have, that well-adjusted people didn’t do things like join the Avengers. Well-adjusted people didn’t do most of the dumb things Steve had done, either—like take jobs from smug assholes who broke into their apartments. Like flip open a blank page in his sketchbook even while frowning in irritation, because the angles of Hawkeye’s nose and jaw in profile were going to take practice to get right.

“Just Clint?”

He twitched his head to grin at Steve, depriving Steve of the side-view he’d been studying. Steve didn’t complain—he was just doodling, not expecting them to model—and moved his pencil to a blank spot to start on the curve of the bow peeking over Hawkeye’s shoulder instead.

“Hey, I kinda like that: like Madonna! But nah. Clint Barton, not that that means much, because despite Tony’s claims I really am a boring dude.”

“You’re a literal carnie, Clint, but okay. Moving on!”

“Like a fucking spoiled rich kid on Christmas.”

The mutter startled Steve; it came from the Soldier, who hadn’t talked at all before and who Steve had expected to have a strong Russian accent because—well, there wasn’t really any reason other than stereotyping for him to have expected that, he realized with a pang of guilt. The Soldier’s voice was rough, a kind of gruff tough-guy grit that brought to mind classic Westerns and gangster movies and other pillars of machismo, but other than that he just sounded any random guy Steve might find in his neighborhood.

“Okay,” the Soldier grumbled, “fine. Let’s skip the goddamn theatrics. This is the big deal, so how about we get it over with so our artist pal here can do his job.”

The Soldier took off his goggles first, and Steve’s fingers stilled in their idle sketching as he met flinty blue eyes for the first time. His breath might have stilled, too, feeling worryingly like an impending asthma attack as the Soldier reached back to unfasten his mask. When it fell away into his other hand, Steve’s held breath left him in a rush.

“Holy shit,” he said, “you’re Captain America.”


	2. Chapter 2

Captain America, AKA James Buchanan Barnes, was a hero of World War II. Barnes volunteered to be a candidate for the first test of the super soldier serum when he enlisted in 1941 and debuted as the enhanced Captain America a year and a half later. He helped the US war effort as a figurehead in the beginning, and then as leader of the elite Howling Commandos until 1945, when he stopped a Nazi scientist from destroying the world and fell to his death in the process.

Somehow, on top of all that, he was also sitting across the table from Steve in 2018, alive and at least 60% whole, not especially looking like he was in his nineties, with the Winter Soldier’s metal arm and costume and a bullshit smirk that didn’t touch his icy eyes. Steve opened his mouth, couldn’t find anything to say with it despite the dozens of threads running through his thoughts, and closed it again. He took stock of the other Avengers, their expressions ranging from gleeful—Stark—to uncomfortable—Banner—to pleasantly neutral—Widow.

That was, clearly, the big revelation that Fury and Stark had been anticipating, in their very different ways. There were bound to be other things that the Avengers and Fury didn’t want getting out, things he would be told he couldn’t include in his comic and secrets Fury considered worth threatening him with a life of solitary confinement in a place that didn’t exist on paper, but he couldn’t imagine any of it would be as big as what he was back to staring at.

The Winter Soldier was Captain America. National icon, fallen hero, all-around golden boy. And nobody knew.

That had to be intentional. More than he wanted to know how Barnes had survived and what had happened to him in the intervening years, Steve wanted to know who had made the decision to keep that a secret and why. The Soldier had come to the public eye during the Battle of New York in 2012, which meant Barnes had been the Winter Soldier by that point longer than he’d been Captain America—and that wasn’t including whatever or whoever he’d been with Widow before they defected.

Apparently the silence went on too long for Stark’s tastes, because he clapped his hands together and said, too-cheerful, “So, you’re a fan of Bucky Bear?”

Barnes’s eyes narrowed, twitching a sideways glare at Stark without moving his head. Steve’s eyes narrowed, too, but they stayed fixed on Barnes.

“No,” Steve said. “I don’t think that I am.”

Stark cackled. Barnes leaned forward, face grim. Widow said, “Now that we have that vital question answered, Tony, how about you stop treating this like your own personal soap opera? The fewer of us Steve hates to start out with, the more pleasant it will be for everyone involved.”

“Yeah, but less fun,” Barton muttered at the same time that Stark said, “Steve doesn’t hate me! Right? Steve, do you hate me?”

Steve was still staring at Barnes, who had also stopped looking at anything but Steve. He kind of looked like he wanted to murder Steve, honestly. If he thought that glare was going to get Steve to back down, to cower and simper and worship him as the golden example of America at its so-called finest that he had been, he had another goddamn thing coming.

All Barnes said was, “Your turn, Vdova.”

The unfamiliar word jarred Steve sideways from indignation to confusion, but before he could figure out if Barnes was insulting him, much less react to it, Widow said, “No, my turn was the one you butted into because you and Tony are both toddlers. But thanks anyway.”

It was a dirty play, because Steve had to look at Widow then; she hadn’t given him any reason to justify rudeness, especially not the kind of rude that would’ve had his mom feeling guilty for how he turned out; he tried to avoid that even for people who really deserved it. He wasn’t a total monster. So since it would have been unforgivably rude to keep glaring at Barnes, he instead turned his attention to her and tried to be less angry about it.

So he looked at Widow, even though it forced him to be the first to look away from his stare-down with Barnes. It wasn’t weakness, it was being the better person. That didn’t mean it didn’t rankle.

Widow smiled at him, the same bland, vapid expression that she’d offered before—a freshly washed linen sheet covering a bed he knew had to be made of razor blades. Maybe it was more convincing for people who didn’t know who she was, when she was undercover on a mission and no one looked too hard past the pretty face.

“I have a lot of names,” she said, “but I like Natasha best for now. Natasha Romanov.”

She watched him expectantly. They all did, with a new intensity that had taken hold while Romanov was talking. Even Stark’s flippancy was gone, his expression so hard it might as well have been Iron Man’s mask. The weight of the Avengers’ focus bearing down on him—a broke, unaccomplished, chronically ill, artistic nobody—might’ve been intimidating if he let it.

He did not let it.

He met each of their gazes in turn, pushing down the shiver that Barnes’s icy eyes tried to send up from the base of his spine. “I’m Steve Rogers.” Not that they didn’t know that, but if the point of the meeting was introductions then he was damn well going to introduce himself, too. He set his jaw and waited for—something. What came next, whatever that was going to be. Or if they were done, he could think of a few more things to say.

“You already said that.”

Barnes smirked when Steve shot him another scowl. Just the very corner of one side of his mouth, tipping up so faintly that Steve might not have caught it if not for his eye for expression. But he did notice those things, so he saw it on Barnes’s face and resented it. He also noticed the wince that immediately followed, slight as it was, and the sidelong glare at Romanov; unlike Barnes, she gave nothing away under Steve’s scrutiny.

From the first time Fury had explained the plan, Steve had known that if he was really going to invest in rehabilitating the image of the Avengers, the Winter Soldier would be the biggest problem. He was also the biggest reason why Steve wasn’t planning to invest in that side of the project. But he’d pinned Iron Man as the second focus, because—well, because Tony Stark was Tony Stark. He was in the public eye a lot, and not usually in a way that did his reputation any favors. Hulk’s collateral damage wasn’t popular, Thor’s brother and very existence were both points of contention—but Hawkeye and Black Widow tended to fade into the background.

Most New Yorkers had opinions on most of the team—loved them or reviled them—but those two had avoided that controversial status by avoiding almost all the attention. Surrounded by larger-than-life monsters, gods, and personalities, they were easy to dismiss as less significant. Given the apparent uncontested control Romanov had over Barnes, Steve had to wonder if she wasn’t the most significant person at that table.

Especially in light of the revelation of Barnes’s identity. Had she known who he was? Had they really defected together, or had she made the decision and brought him along like a favorite pet—or a favored weapon? And, maybe most importantly, did that make her responsible for what the Soldier had done?

He had to know. The best place to start, he thought, was almost the same question he’d given Fury: “Did you know the school bus was empty?” he asked Romanov.

“Fuck you,” Barnes spit out viciously, lurching up from his chair again.

Steve had been wrong when he thought Barnes looked like he wanted to kill Steve; now he knew what that really looked like.

“You have no fucking idea what I—” He cut himself off abruptly, metal arm whirring as his hand clenched into a fist. When he spoke again a moment later his tone was easy, careless in a way that the tight corners of his eyes and mouth didn’t match. “Forget it. Welcome to the Tower, Rogers. I’m sure you’ll feel right at home.”

He stalked past Steve, who again felt a tension sparking low in his spine; unease, he was still sure, at having Barnes at his back. Especially after pissing him off so much. He refused to give in to it, he wasn’t so easily intimidated that he would turn to watch Barnes go just to assure himself he wasn’t about to be stabbed in the back.

At least not until Romanov called, “Soldat.”

When Steve looked over his shoulder, he caught Barnes waving Romanov off and continuing to the door. Then Romanov said something else, more Russian, and Barnes jerked to a stop. He pivoted, somehow even more murderous still, and made a beeline for his seat. He didn’t sit; he grabbed his mask, such abrupt anger in each move that Steve expected the plastic to crack in his grip despite Barnes using his normal hand, not the metal one.

It didn’t crack. It fit back into place over the lower half of Barnes’s face, obscuring his identity but not his glower. He flashed that glare over Steve one more time, and for just a second, with only his eyes visible, Steve could almost have sworn that they were more hurt than hateful. Then they, too, were gone, disappearing behind the Soldier’s dark goggles.

Steve’s gaze dropped to the table, to his sketchbook, but his attention followed Barnes all the way to the door. So did his thoughts.

Steve had assumed the mask was for his benefit, to keep him in the dark just like the rest of the world until they were ready for him to know. To make for a more dramatic reveal, to see if they felt like trusting him beyond Fury’s background check; whatever the reason, he’d thought it had to be specifically to keep him from knowing the Winter Soldier’s identity. But there was no possible way for that exchange to have been about Steve. He’d already learned the secret, after all.

It was common knowledge that the Avengers all lived at Stark Tower. Or Avengers Tower, as it was sometimes called. Fury had confirmed it when he had told Steve about his new living arrangements, it was a large part of the reason Steve had to live there too. Barnes was in his own home—and he had to put a mask on just to walk around inside it.

The realization made something burn inside Steve, a small, ugly flame he couldn’t immediately identify. Disappointment, maybe. It wasn’t like Steve had been one of those kids obsessed with his Captain America lunch box, but he’d had one all the same. It had been special less for the hero it represented than the rare experience of a brand new toy under the Christmas tree, something too expensive to ever have expected. He’d cherished it for that, but the whole reason she got it for him was that he admired the Cap of the stories.

Bucky Barnes had been a brave and selfless man, a hero not just for his physical capabilities—he had those, sure, but they didn’t mean much to a boy who hadn’t been allowed in a gym class since the first grade, who missed school two or three times a month for hospital visits. But doing the right thing even when it was hard, when it was dangerous or unpopular, and standing by his convictions? Even someone like Steve could do that.

Apparently someone like the real Barnes couldn’t. When push came to shove, the stories were just that: stories. More propaganda, like what Fury wanted from Steve. Captain America wasn’t brave or selfless; he was a coward. He threw school buses at suicide bombers and hid who he really was so as not to tarnish his heroic good name.

Steve had known going in that the Avengers wouldn’t improve his opinion of them, but he’d never imagined that they could have made it worse. But he was more disgusted than ever—and more determined than ever that he was going to blow the whole thing wide open. Not in the sympathetic light Fury was hoping for. He would be brutally honest and let the public decide for themselves what they thought of it. It was long past time for that kind of accountability.

The door slammed behind Barnes and Steve looked up to take in the rest of the team’s reactions. He noticed his lower lip caught in his teeth, where it often ended up when he was thinking or drawing, in time to avoid giving Stark any ideas about his twinkish charm or whatever else might follow. But Stark wasn’t paying attention to him; he was looking past Steve to the door where Barnes had gone. So was Banner. Barton and Romanov seemed to be having an intense conversation with just their hands, but none of the signs were ones Steve knew.

In fact, the only person who met Steve’s eyes was Thor, who looked so sincerely disappointed that Steve—who had never once been successfully made to feel ashamed of standing up for his principles—felt a sliver of guilty doubt. Had he crossed a line? He’d been mistreated enough in life, both for who he was and for assumptions made about who he was, that he never wanted to be responsible for doing the same to someone else. He knew he had a temper and tried his best to give people the benefit of the doubt before unleashing it on them.

But he could find nothing redeeming in the things Barnes had done. No amount of incongruous puppy dog eyes from a giant man who called himself a god would convince him otherwise.

Steve braced himself for some disappointed kindergarten teacher lecture, ready to keep fighting it out. Calling out the Avengers’ hypocrisy and recklessness had been primary in his mind since accepting Fury’s terms; he didn’t exactly have diagrams ready, but he had enough evidence in his head to draw them up on demand if they were going to get down to it.

Instead, what Thor said was, “This is a momentous day that brings with it significant change for all of us. Now that we have met, let us permit Steven to settle into his new home. Do you not have traditions surrounding this joyous event? I fear we have gone about this wrong from the beginning, my friends. It is no wonder we find ourselves at odds.”

Earnestly, his words aimed only at Steve rather than the room at large, Thor continued, “Please forgive our insufficient hospitality. We shall prepare a banquet for tonight and welcome you in appropriate fashion as our honored guest.”

“Uh, that’s...”

Once again thrown off-course, Steve took a moment to adjust his outlook. He was as certain as he reasonably could be that Thor wasn’t mocking him. If he didn’t say anything, he was going to end up with a hell of a housewarming party for a secure corporate tower he didn’t really want to live in with housemates who mostly didn’t really want him there. That sounded even more excruciatingly awkward and tense than their first meeting had already been, and far less conducive to actually accomplishing anything.

“That’s really not necessary, but thank you.”

“I insist!” Thor boomed.

“No,” Stark interrupted, drawing out the vowel, “you don’t. Buddy, you know I love Pepper’s shindigs as much as the next guy—more than!—but we don’t throw them for people who don’t want them.

“Remember what happened last time?” he added with a significant look at Banner, who was still staring at the door, possibly in a meditative trance given the glassiness of his gaze.

“Ah, yes. That was an unfortunate event not to be repeated. Very well, no banquet tonight. Though you may yet change your mind, for Miss Potts is an exceptional hostess.”

“But you’re right, it’s a good time for Steve to check out his apartment. Why don’t I show you up?” Romanov asked, her smile so mild Steve thought it might mean he would be dead before his alarm the next morning. Maybe sooner.

But Barton stood first, said, “Nah, I got this. You go stop Buck from doing anything stupid. Or help him, what do I know, I’m not in charge. Rogers, with me.”

Steve thought, in a tone that sounded a lot like his mother at her most exasperated, that only he would manage to meet a group of superheroes and within an hour find himself wondering if half of them were about to be in competition for who could kill him first. Well, him and Loki, but that wasn’t exactly good company to be in.

Then again, there weren’t very many non-megalomaniacs who encountered the Avengers all at once, given their identities and the secrecy surrounding some of them. Stark made semi-frequent appearances, sometimes going on what seemed to be every talk show in the nation in the span of three days and other times disappearing in seclusion for months on end, but he was alone in that. One Avenger or another might have been caught by a reporter for comments after an incident, but never as a team and never one of the three Steve may potentially have inspired to murder him.

For all he let his thoughts drift to the dramatic, and despite Fury’s even greater penchant for drama, Steve knew he wasn’t about to be secretly assassinated. Not due to any faith in the inherent goodness of the Avengers, though he think even they had a line between reckless civilian casualties and premeditated murder. Definitely not from a belief in SHIELD doing what was just and moral. They didn’t have a great track record on that. He would have been easy to get rid of, no one to really miss him if he never came back; he’d even let his lease run out, since he was locked down for the next six months at least.

But Steve simply refused to live in a world where that could be allowed. No improperly supervised branch of the DOJ or DoD—and that he didn’t know which was just another strike against them—was going to disappear him because he wouldn’t let them. Maybe stubbornness could’t stop a bullet, but if anyone was equipped to try, it was Steven Grant Rogers and he wouldn’t flinch while doing so.

He might stop breathing because he hadn’t thought to get his inhaler from his medicine bag, but he wouldn’t flinch.

Closing his book on the sketch of Hawkeye’s bow, he followed the real thing back out to the elevator without incident. Even inside, Barton didn’t say anything as he pushed a button for one of the top floors. He hummed instead, quiet and mostly off-key, doing a very good impression of being entirely unconcerned about anything that had just happened. Steve didn’t trust it, though Barton gave nothing away with his expression. It was a different sort of poker face than Romanov’s; she hid behind a facade of politeness and he played clueless, but neither of them would have made it to where they were without more going on beneath the surface.

“You’re a hard guy to get a read on,” Barton said, an echo of Steve’s thoughts. The elevator rose so smoothly Steve couldn’t even feel the movement; it chimed their arrival just after Barton’s words. Just before he added, looking thoughtfully out the door while Steve looked at him, “Do you know why you got offered this job?”

Barton didn’t make a move to get off, so neither did Steve. “Because Fury wants me to make you into comic book heroes.”

“Yeah, but why you?”

“Because I’m boring enough to get clearance and no one will miss me.”

After a second of frowning into the distance, eyebrows furrowed but expression otherwise unchanged, Barton snorted and broke into a grin. “Oh, this is gonna be fun. Listen, Fury didn’t find you. You may have just met the guy, but can you really picture Nick Fury scrolling through the terrifying world of furry porn in search of an artist who takes commissions? Nah, man. I followed your webcomic back in the day, thought you had a cool style, good characters. Handled the tough shit well, you know. So this came up and I thought of you.”

Barton turned his head to pierce Steve with his gaze, though his mouth still carried a light smile. “First door on the right. Get out of my elevator, move in to your apartment, don’t fuck this up.”

It was only because Steve was already juggling so many different thoughts, working through so much new information, that he made two mistakes he normally would have avoided. The first was exiting the elevator just because Barton told him to, even though if he’d considered it for a moment he would’ve had more questions about Fury’s motives. The second was asking, “Wait, which comic was it?”

He realized what he’d done a second too late, when Barton’s eyes lit up. “You had more than one?”

“No!” The prickle of heat in his cheeks gave him away. “I just meant—”

“Yeah, sorry, kid,” Barton drawled, not sounding sorry at all. “Can’t bullshit me on this one. Enjoy your new place, I’ve got some research to do.”

“It’s really bad!” Steve warned the closing doors. “I was a seventeen-year-old virgin!”

“I’m so glad you’re here!” Barton shouted back.

There was no point standing around once the elevator was clearly gone, so Steve made his way to the door Barton had indicated. It didn’t have a knob, but the touchpad to one side had an outline that looked like it was waiting for a handprint. Hesitantly, Steve placed his palm against it. He’d been fingerprinted during his background investigation, but never given them a full handprint—so of course it flashed once under his touch and then the door slid open.

With one look inside, Steve was too busy being shocked to keep being irritated about the invasion of his privacy that he really knew to expect by then. What he could see of the apartment, which didn’t seem to be anywhere near all of it, was more spacious and expensive than any hotel he’d stayed at in his life, never mind places he actually lived. The wide entry hallway had an opening in the wall that showed off a corner of the kitchen, with appliances that looked like they cost as much as Steve’s monthly rent. Each. At the end of the hall was an open area with two couches and a coffee table, then another table for eating with four chairs set around the sides.

It was more space than Steve needed, more than he could even imagine finding a use for. Because though he initially thought that he could drag the table and a chair over to the—floor-to-ceiling—window for better light and use it for his work, his exploration shortly turned up an even more well-lit studio with the boxes he’d marked as his art supplies already in the center of it, waiting to be unpacked. He was used to working at his too-low, dented, and scratched kitchen table, but the room before him had both an adjustable desk and an adjustable easel.

He could draw for hours without escalating pain eating away at his spine; it was almost enough to bring tears to his eyes.

The urge to do just that pulled at his chest and made his fingers itch, but he drew himself away to finish looking around.

Unexpectedly, the bedroom was almost reasonable: large but not excessive, plainly decorated, and even lacking a walk-in closet—though the standard closet was generous. The attached bathroom, on the other hand, was even more absurd than the rest of the suite of rooms.

The shower alone was the size Steve’s old bathroom had been, with two massive glass doors and a shower head that looked broader than his shoulders. He let himself daydream about endless hot water and water pressure for exactly five seconds: warmth relaxing the ache that never really left his back, steam whirled away by working fans so he could breathe. Then he accepted reality, which was that changing his shower habits would be both wasteful and setting himself up for disappointment when he moved out, and got to work filling the built-in shelves with his toiletries.

Back in the bedroom, he hung and refolded his clothes, set up his alarm clock, stocked his nightstand drawer. He was sure SHIELD had searched his belongings after he packed them, but didn't especially care. If they were going to tell him he was stuck there for months, they would just have to deal with rifling through his sex toys.

Once he had his room arranged to his satisfaction, he skipped over the temptation of the art studio; he'd leave that for last. Instead, he went out to the main area and nearly had a heart attack.

Steve took his time verifying that his startled gasp wasn't going to escalate to breathless gasps, then straightened to glare at the unmoving Winter Soldier.

“Are you here to kill me?”

“You can leave.”

“I can leave or you’ll kill me?” Steve rolled his eyes and crossed his arms. “If I leave, your boss will have me locked up for the rest of my life in some offshore prison colony, so—”

“No,” Barnes cut in, voice low and rough. Not being able to read his expression troubled Steve, made it impossible to judge the immediacy of the threat. Probably why the face covering was part of his outfit. “I mean—if you want to leave, you can leave.”

“Fury—”

“Isn’t gonna lock you up or kill you or whatever else he’s threatened you with. He’d have to go through me and that’s never gone very well for him.”

“Why would you do that?”   
  
“So that if you want to leave, you can leave,” Barnes said again, more slowly, like the answer should’ve been self-evident. Then he left, his steps intent but silent, the door whispering open and then closed, Steve following chains of thought and not trying to stop him.

James Barnes had been an American supersoldier in World War II. In the time since he was presumed dead, he’d lost an arm and had it replaced with a machine branded with a Soviet star, fled or been stolen back to his birth country without recognition, and been given a mask to wear that he didn’t remove even at home in Avengers Tower—a tower, Steve realized, he had never seen the Soldier outside of except during a fight.

Why did Barnes need Steve to know he could leave? Maybe it was obvious after all.


	3. Chapter 3

Steve didn’t sleep that night. He’d barely gotten any rest the night before, so he should have been exhausted—and in a way he was, drained from the excitement and conflict of the day. Physically, too, he was weary, which his bones made sure to inform him by creaking and aching in protest of his continued consciousness. But his mind was much too busy to stop, running through everything he’d learned that day and replaying what had been said and done in the conference room.

He kept catching on Barnes’s eyes in the last few moments he’d seen them. He couldn’t get that image out of his head, no matter how hard he tried to shift his focus to other parts of the conversation. Finally, frustrated, he pulled out his colored pencils and threw himself moodily onto the couch, hunching over the coffee table to start committing those eyes to paper. He didn’t go to the studio because he wasn’t going to spend much time on it; he just needed to get it out so he could move on.

The shape of them came first, drooping from the center down to the outside corner where lines creased the skin around them. Even within that pinched expression, they seemed so wide open; almost childishly large and vulnerable. Maybe Steve was remembering them wrong, exaggerating them in his recollection, but when he skipped over to a corner of the sketchbook and tried to redraw them with different proportions, he knew within a few sketchy lines that they didn’t look right. Besides, if his image of Barnes was being distorted by Steve’s perception, it wouldn’t have skewed him into innocence.

Would it? He wasn’t sure what he thought of Barnes anymore, after the visit he’d made to tell Steve he wasn’t a hostage and all that was implied by his choice to do that. What that changed, if it changed anything at all, was too difficult a question for his current state of sleep deprivation. Filling in Barnes’s eyes—that he could do.

As blues blended into grays, the tension of that conflict flowed out of him to be replaced with frustration that he couldn’t get the colors quite right. Irises appeared all over the page, filling the whitespace with gradients that were too light, too dark; too dull, too saturated, too—

Something.

He didn’t know what he was missing, why matching his art to the vision in his mind was so much more difficult than he usually found it. He could picture Barnes’s eyes—couldn’t help but picture them, had all but fallen into obsession with them—but couldn’t capture them no matter how long he spent scratching swatch after swatch of pencil colors over each other. 

At some point his exhaustion most have caught up with him, because he woke to the all-too-familiar twinge of his back going above and beyond its normal protest against his existence. He was no stranger to spending an accidental night passed out over his work, but every time it happened he promised himself he’d never do it again. Of course, that lasted a couple weeks at the most until he got lost in a new burst of inspiration. He’d always pushed his limits further than he should have, even far enough that he’d been accused of being self-destructive more than once, and the recovery periods when he let it get really bad could be rough.

He hated that his health gave him less leeway to make bad decisions than most of his peers, but he loved the way it felt to dedicate himself to creation. There was nothing but him and his art, a picture he could see unfolding from lines and colors into a story, a world only he could bring to life. All the physical bullshit—the aches that never stopped, the cramps that made it hard to keep holding his pen, the hunger of another hospital bill—it all stopped mattering.

Trouble was, Steve being able to ignore those things didn’t actually make them go away. The world was still real, he had neighbors and a part-time job and freelance gigs that didn’t give him the joy of feeling unbounded but did pay the bills. And when those things pulled him out or stopped him from being able to throw himself into a project of passion, as was the case more often than not, he suffered for his overindulgence.

Like realizing he’d been such a wreck that he’d fallen forward onto the table, instead of being at least coherent enough to direct himself sideways on the overstuffed couch, and one of the sharp glass corners had been digging into his ribs for however long he’d been out. It had to have been more than a few hours. The light surrounding him had the warm hue and diffusion of sunlight, not anything artificial. Then again, if anyone could find a way to fake that, it would be Stark.

With a bit of groaning and a lot of audible, uncomfortable popping in his back, he sat up to look for his phone or a clock. Instead, he found not one but two assassins—spies, Avengers, whatever they were—standing in what he had clearly been very mistaken to think was his apartment. Barton had told him it was his, it had a door that even had a lock that accepted his handprint, but neither of those security measures provided any measure of security, if his unwanted visitor count was anything to go by.

At least his first thought wasn’t that he was about to be murdered, as it had been with his last guest. For one thing, they didn’t appear decked out in masks and goggles as Barnes had been, nor in the same sort of tactical body armor that made it very clear that someone killed people for a living. Barton was wearing sweatpants. Steve was also reasonably confident, as far as such things went, that Barton didn’t want to kill him.

He couldn’t say the same for Romanov, but if she hadn’t taken the chance when he was passed out and defenseless, that probably meant she wasn’t going to. She wasn’t even looking at him; she was studying the sketchbook he’d fallen asleep over, her mouth a tight line.

“Interesting choice of subject,” she said.

Steve looked down, too, at the dozens of attempts he’d made to capture Barnes’s eyes. Each was a different mix of colors—he hadn’t managed to get it right in all his tired efforts—but they all had the same heavy sadness to them. When he was falling into the frenzy of trying to get that image out of his head and onto the paper, he’d been frustrated not just at his inability to do so, but also at not understanding why it mattered so much. Seeing his work with fresher eyes and clearer thoughts, it turned out to be very simple.

His mom would’ve been so disappointed.

“Can I see him?” he asked Romanov. He didn’t think he had to clarify any more than he had to ask if she recognized his model; he was right.

“Why?”

“I’d like to apologize.”

She raised a faintly skeptical eyebrow without directing it at him, her attention still circling the paper. Her disbelief didn’t surprise him—he’d definitely earned that—but her willingness to display it to him did. It hadn’t occurred to him to try and figure out why they were there before he started talking, but that look alone made him wish he had. Since it was too late for that, he pushed on.

“I was an asshole. Yesterday—well. You were there, you know. When I told Fury I’d take this job, I’d already made up my mind about how it was going to go. With all of you, but most of all with him. From the things I already knew, I decided I knew why he’d done the things he’d done and what I thought about that and what kind of a person that made him.”

“And now you’re realizing you were wrong?” Barton prompted, hopeful with a hint of smugness that gave Steve an idea why they were there.

Steve couldn’t give it to him that easily, though. “I don’t know if I’m wrong,” he said honestly. “But that’s just it: I don’t know. I don’t really know anything about any of you, it all comes down to gossip and assumptions, but I made judgements anyway. And I wasn’t willing to listen to anything else.”

For a heavy moment, his admission was met with silence. Barton gave him a slight smile and a sly thumbs-up, but it was clear the decision wasn’t his to make. It was Romanov’s, and whether that was because she was the Soldier’s handler or Barnes’s friend was another thing Steve didn’t know but wanted to find out properly, instead of jumping to conclusions again. So he waited for her ruling, watching with a patience that didn’t come naturally to him as she continued to study his study of Barnes’s eyes.

At last, she said, “You can see him.”

Then she picked up Steve’s sketchbook and turned to walk down the hall to the door.

“Wait!” he called after her, to no effect. “Where are you taking that? I didn’t mean right this second—can I change first? I haven’t even brushed my teeth!”

But she was gone. Barton offered him a hand up and a wry grin that had more to do with the position of his eyebrows than his mouth. “You look fine,” he said. Then he tilted his head consideringly, looking Steve over. “Any meds you need to take before we head out, though? It’ll probably be a while before you get back here and I don’t wanna fuck anything up for you.”

Steve blinked. He hadn’t actually found his phone or a clock, since his search was interrupted, and another look around didn’t locate either one. Eventually he’d need to figure out where in his palatial new set of rooms he’d left his phone, but it wasn’t as important as going to talk to Barnes. “What time is it?”

“Somewhere between nine-thirty and ten,” Barton answered, not checking anything first. “I’m not sure where my watch went, so I’ve been having to ask Nat all morning. Huh. Come to think of it, every time I ask she checks her watch, but she doesn’t usually wear a watch. And the one she has looks a lot like mine. I’m a moron, aren’t I?”

Barton’s tone and expression were inviting Steve to laugh, evolving as he talked through his revelation and reached that genuine, self-deprecating conclusion, and it made Steve sincerely want to laugh. So he did, and Barton snickered with him, and it was a pleasant moment but he didn’t want to lose track of what really mattered.

“Speaking of, shouldn’t we get going?” He stood, his back cracking out a few more protests, and stretched his neck as far as he could without unspeakable pain to see if Romanov was waiting for them. She wasn’t; he hadn’t heard his door open or close, but it must have done both since she was nowhere in sight.

Alarmed, he started after her but stopped when Barton held up a hand in front of him—not blocking his way, if he really wanted to get around it, just getting his attention.

“Don’t worry, I know where she’s going. We shouldn’t keep her waiting too long, so I wouldn’t risk a refreshing morning shower or anything unless you want to see what grumpy looks like on her, but we can take a minute if there’s anything you need.”

Suspicion prickled in Steve’s throat, tight and itchy and hot. It felt almost like an allergic reaction, and in a way he supposed it wasn’t that different: it always flared up when it seemed like someone was crossing the line from understanding and accommodating into condescending pity.

“What makes you so sure I should? If I did need to take anything, which would be none of your business, I could manage it on my own. Are you this invasively insistent with all of your guests, or just the visibly disabled who can’t bench press twice their own weight?”

Barton rolled his eyes and complained to the ceiling, “Tough crowd. Stand down, Rogers. I’m not that asshole making assumptions based on how you look and Fury didn’t give us your full medical record, or whatever other conspiracy crap you’re building up to be angry about. At the risk of making myself sound like a total creep, for not just reading them but remembering them, some of your update posts included pretty frank commentary about your hospital stays. In particular, there was a rant about an ‘advent calendar of pills’ that really stuck with me.”

That had indeed happened.

Steve had been even less patient with his own health when he was younger and much more prone to railing against the unfairness of his life. He had written more than one complaint into his webcomic’s blog, and the fact that Barton remembered was actually surprisingly touching. He’d really meant it about being a fan. And he hadn’t been particularly subtle about calling Steve out for making assumptions like an asshole again, which Steve appreciated; for all his resolve to do better, he needed the help.

“Right. Okay. I’m not due for any meds, but I should eat something pretty soon. I’ve got some meal replacement shakes, it’ll just take a minute—”

 “Unless you’ve got particular nutritional needs or restrictions, don’t worry about that. Buck’s making brunch.”

“What?”

“Bucky Barnes. Winter Soldier. Poached eggs that could make a Michelin-starred chef weep.”

“I’m not inviting myself over to take his food, I need to apologize.”

“You’re not inviting yourself, Nat’s inviting you. I’m inviting myself, because neither of them ever does, but that’s normal. That’s just how our friendship works. Now come on. This is a good thing, I promise.”

He followed Clint to the elevator, which took them up three floors in a few smooth seconds. When it came to a barely noticeable stop, the doors didn’t open, nor did it play its typical chime until Barton pressed his palm, fingers splayed, next to the row of buttons. There was no handprint scanner panel like the one outside Steve’s door, there wasn’t a break or seam or change of texture to distinguish that spot from the wall surrounding it, but the arrival tone sounded and the doors slid open.

Immediately, Steve saw the reason for the extra security: unlike Steve’s floor, where the elevator connected to a hallway with multiple doors in addition to the one for his apartment, the 99th floor led straight into a living space. The very first thing that caught his attention was a curved countertop, sparkling stone in an almost-complete circle at least four yards across; large enough to enclose a kitchen with even more appliances than the one given to Steve downstairs. Though it could have fit two dozen with room to spare, the bar only had four stools set around the outside, and all of those were clustered to one side of a built-in stovetop.

Rather than the mirror-polished stainless steel of Steve’s, the range was a vibrant navy blue. It wasn’t the only splash of color to stand out. Every surface that could have been bare metal, or even the glossy white or black traditional for kitchen fixtures, instead burst forth in bright and uncoordinated hues. A firetruck red refrigerator, canary microwave, lime green toaster, violently purple oven; even the range hood was a shade of orange that Steve had never seen in person before.

If anyone had asked his opinion when designing the room, he probably would have had some very unfavorable things to say about their understanding of basic color theory. He would’ve had to eat his words, because rather than the clash any reasonable person would’ve expected, the end result was just chaotic and varied enough to give the impression of a natural rainbow without the cheesiness that was nearly impossible to avoid when intentionally aiming for that look. The person responsible was either a world-class interior designer or an extremely lucky amateur.

He put aside trying to figure out which it was when Barnes walked in. He was dressed even more casually than Barton in a maroon drawstring hoodie with the hood down and a pair of light gray yoga pants, and the look was so incongruous with everything else Steve had seen and thought that it took him longer than it should have to even recognize that it was the same man, even though Barnes wasn’t wearing anything to cover his face.

First, Steve saw him just as a soft-looking man, comfortable as a person could only be in their own home. Then he processed the dark circles under his eyes, the lines of tension around them, that said he was a man who had seen too much and was exhausted from it. Then he was looking at Captain America, mouth set in a determined line that echoed the dramatic scenes in old war effort newsreels that played on loops in museum exhibits, that gave away the lie in his apparent ease.

Only after all that did Steve see that the Winter Soldier was holding his sketchbook.

Barnes set it on the counter in front of one of the stools, still open to the page covered in eyes that weren’t quite his, then circled around into the kitchen area without a word. Barton looked at him, then at Steve, then said, too-casual, “I’m gonna go find Nat.”

Back to them, Barnes nodded his acknowledgement then opened the fridge and half his body disappeared head-first inside. That left Steve nothing to stare at except—something very distracting.

And he wasn’t going to stare at Barnes’s ass, no matter how much it stuck out as he bent over to rummage through a drawer or how tightly the stretchy fabric clung to muscle that could have been sculpted from marble. He’d come to apologize to Barnes, not objectify him.

Leaving thoughts of the former behind for the relative safety of a possible confrontation about the latter, he walked over to the stools, returning Barton’s parting wave as he made his escape. The seat of the stool where Barnes had left his sketches was a normal height for a bar, which meant Steve couldn’t just sit on it, and the horizontal rung partway down the legs for stability was too low for him use to reach the seat. With one foot there, one hand on the counter, and one hand on the seat, he still had to jump awkwardly to get the edge of his ass onto the stool, then scoot back until he was sitting properly.

He only looked back at Barnes when he was done, ready with a glare and a defensive retort if he was about to be mocked for his height, but Barnes hadn’t even noticed the struggle; he was still lost deep inside the bright red appliance.

A few seconds later, emerging with a carton of eggs and two bags of something leafy and dark green, Barnes said, “I was drafted.”

“You—” Steve tried to figure out where that had come from or what it meant, failed, and fell back on the always-reliable, “What?”

“I was drafted. When we joined the war I was twenty-three, working a couple jobs that weren’t much to speak of, just stuff around the docks, but I was good at it and it paid the rent. No wife or kids to support, no family to keep me respectable in the evenings, enough change in my pocket to have a good time a couple nights a week. It wasn’t exactly the Great American Dream, but I was happy with it. Why the hell should I go fight and die for someone else’s war unless I had to?”

Barnes’s voice stayed steady, his movements smooth and calm as he pulled out pots and pans and knives.

“But that doesn’t make a good story, so they say I enlisted. Whatever you’re disappointed that I’m not anymore—I never was.”

With that pronouncement, he met Steve’s gaze at last—those same eyes that had kept haunting Steve through his dreams—then looked away just as decisively to start two predictably bright enamel pots of water to boil.

Ignoring the way his eyes tried to drag themselves down to compare his efforts against the real thing, how his fingers itched to flip to a clean page and try again, Steve said, “I’m not disappointed.”

Barnes’s scoff was almost lost beneath the sounds of his preparation, bowls going out on the counter and eggs getting cracked into them, but it was there. And it was fair, given Steve’s behavior.

“I was,” he acknowledged, “but that was my problem, not yours. I called Stark a bully then turned around and did what I was accusing him of to you.”

“You bullied me,” Barnes said, flat and skeptical, not looking up from his whisking.

“I pre-judged you. I used your status as a, a superhuman, I guess, as an excuse to treat you like you were less than human. I’m sorry. for that. I let other people shape my opinion and was so unwilling to admit it that I chose to be a dick instead, even though I really hate when people do that. I—”

“Yeah, I heard about what you told Vdova. So what? You do your own research instead of relying on a sensationalist clickbait article, okay, good for you. You’re not gonna like what you find any better.”

Steve’s first instinct was indignation. If Barnes had done things so terrible that he didn’t think the truth was any better than the awful stuff already out there, did he honestly expect Steve to have any sympathy for him? Trying to turn himself into the victim of the job Steve had been hired to do, well, that was exactly the sort of entitled bullshit Steve expected. If he felt remorse—like Barnes himself had said, good for him but so what? His guilt didn’t absolve him of his crimes and it definitely wasn’t a good reason to keep them secret.

Then he fought down that response, because his knee-jerk assumptions about Barnes hadn’t served him well the day before and he was trying not to repeat them. He didn’t want to spend another manic night trying to atone for his own bad behavior, even if his didn’t involve dead bodies. When he actually took a second to see Barnes, he didn’t look like a man trying to justify himself. Standing in a rainbow kitchen, dressed more like Steve’s unemployed peers than a hundred-year-old supersoldier and assassin, loose hair sheltering his downturned face as he stared into his batter like he was braced, waiting for Steve to lash out the way he almost had.

Steve had spent enough of his life in fights, verbal and physical both, to know what it looked like when someone was getting ready to fight back. This wasn’t that, but it also wasn’t the look of someone who didn’t think he could fight back. It was—

The thing it most closely resembled, Steve realized with a jolt, was the customer service blandless that he’d never managed to perfect; like the receptionist downstairs. He was ready to let Steve’s bullshit wash over him while he kept doing what he was doing, which by that point was pouring what looked like a one-to-one ratio of chocolate chips into the batter. It was such a familiar response. Not one Steve himself utilized, because no one had ever succeeded in their attempts to get him to pick his battles, but one he’d been around often enough that his instinctive reaction was irritation—not at the expression, but at the person causing it.

Which was him. He was that asshole. Maybe not at that precise moment, but he’d been that asshole the night before and was almost that asshole again.

“Maybe that’s true. Maybe it’s all horrible and I’ll be a dick about it again. And if we do make the comics and the horrible truth gets out there maybe everyone else will be dicks about it, too. But that’s kind of already how it is, isn’t it? All people have to go on, when it comes to you—to the Winter Soldier—are a few action clips and a lot of baseless speculation. And that’s… I mean, you do know how that’s going for you, right?”

Barnes exhaled an almost-laugh. When his eyes caught Steve’s, there was a new sparkle of life to them and a matching twist at the side of his mouth, forlorn but not unhappy. “I’m not thinking of challenging Bruce to any popularity contests, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

Until recently, the Soldier would’ve been a shoe-in against the Hulk on that front. But he was right; after the incident with the bus that got Steve involved, even the rage monster who crushed Harlem didn’t have a lock on being the most despised Avenger.

“I’m not gonna promise it’ll win over hearts and minds or anything, but at least you can set the record straight. People have been lying about you since day one, doesn’t that bother you?”

“No. Like you said, it’s always been like that.” Barnes set his batter down and picked up an egg, then paused before cracking it into a new bowl. “But it bothers you, doesn’t it?”

“Of course it does. I believe in truth, Captain Barnes. Not just when it’s convenient or popular, but as an ideal we should try to live up to all of the time. And maybe a lot of the society has given up on holding people accountable when they lie and cheat and make excuses, but that doesn’t mean we all have to accept it. Especially not when it comes from the people we should be able to trust to lead us, to protect us. Rewriting history to make it sound better isn’t something the good guys should ever do.”

Barnes dropped the egg back in the carton and leaned forward. His metal hand clacked against the stone bar while the other landed silently, but he supported himself equally on both as he stared at Steve across the counter. His eyes were sharp, stormy; they looked darker against all the bright colors and felt like they could pierce right through Steve as easily as any of the Soldier’s knives. He didn’t know what Barnes was looking for, but the fact that he was looking at all was an improvement; an actual interaction, not just the one-sided talking that had been mostly on Steve’s side, or even the back-and-forth that felt as disconnected as trying to gauge someone’s intent through a computer screen.

Still searching Steve’s face with a furrowed brow that caught dramatic shadows from the overhead light, Barnes said, “You can’t honestly tell me that you still think there’s such a thing as ‘the good guys’.”

Steve refused to back down on his principles as a general rule, and that went double when he’d just lectured a former national icon on the subject. “I do. At least, I think there should be. I think there can be, if people are willing to make and stand behind the decision to do what’s right regardless of the cost.”

In the long pause as Barnes continued to stare, the only sound in the kitchen came from the pots of water bubbling to a light boil. Then he blew out a breath that was somewhere between a sigh and a laugh, shaking his head and pushing back out of Steve’s space. It wasn’t until that moment that Steve realized how close they’d been, or that he hadn’t felt even a shiver of trepidation at Barnes’s proximity. It was amazing how much of a difference the Soldier’s outfit made in his baseline menace—then again, it had undoubtedly been designed that way. Steve just hadn’t given it enough credit for doing its job well.

How much did that contribute to the overall negativity surrounding the Winter Soldier?

He filed that thought away for another time as Barnes said, with the same exasperated amusement, “Christ, no wonder Clint likes you. All right, okay. Apology accepted. Keep your disgustingly optimistic morals away from my breakfast and you can stay for it. If you want to.”

“I want to. But—thank you. I should’ve said that last night. Thank you for what you said, what you’re willing to do. I don’t know exactly what it would mean for you, but everything I do know says that it’s no small thing.”

Barnes shrugged that off, but it was a move that seemed to slide back into the false ease he’d been projecting when he first walked in. The retreat hit Steve like whiplash, then it passed just as quickly and he wondered if he’d misread the gesture entirely. Because Barnes was smiling easily when he said, not much louder than they’d been talking, “You two wanna come out and actually participate in the conversation so that I can make your candy pancakes?”

Barton reappeared in the doorway at the far end of the room within a second. “Chocolate is a blessed food, you abomination,” he declared. Hopping up on the stool next to Steve’s with an ease Steve could never hope to achieve, he reached across the counter to swipe a finger through the batter and got his hand smacked with a spatula before he could succeed. He yelped and cradled it against his chest, shooting Barnes a pouty glower that Barnes ignored in favor of saying something to Romanov as she slid in beside Barton.

They went back and forth in Russian for a few sentences before Barton interjected, much less fluently. Romanov and Barnes paused, looked at him, then resumed their conversation. It all sounded the same to Steve, but Barton made a sad noise and said, “Aww, Serbian, no.”

“Serbian, yes.” Barnes smirked, an expression that didn’t falter even when he caught Steve watching it, but he stuck to English for the rest of the meal. Which was, as Barton promised, some of the best food Steve had ever eaten.


End file.
